Backlinks Explained

What is a Backlink? Well, its very simple actually, a Backlink is just a DoFollow
link pointing to a website. I’t’s useful to have a collection of
Backlinks pointing to your website because they are used by most major
search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to determine the trust
level of your website.

The basic concept is that the more links you have going to your site
the better quality the content on the site is and thus it should be
ranked higher in search engines. Backlinks also transfer page rank from
site to site based on a variety of factors. The major factor is the
PageRank of the site who is linking to another site. PageRank is the
quantifiable way for search engines to express how much they trust your
website ranging from PR1 to PR 9.

If you are linked to by a site with very low PageRank (PR) that is
considered a Low-Quality Backlink because it’s not coming from a
reliable source and is thought of by web spiders as a spam backlink.
There are also High-Quality Backlinks which give search engines a much
better impression of your site because they usually come from PR6 to PR9
Websites that are already trusted by search engines. These Backlinks
are also weighted more heavily than Low-Quality ones because they are
coming from a source that is known not to spam links to low-quality
sites.

There are a few exceptions to the Low and High-quality backlink rules
though. The major one is Social Networking sites like Facebook that
have high Pageranks but only give low-quality backlinks. The reasoning
behind this is pretty simple, search engines give backlinks from these
sites less value because they are usually mass posted, and can easily be
posted by the website owner. This is not a bad thing though as if
Backlinks from Social Media sites were worth PR9 status then a link in a
Tweet would be the same as being mentioned in a post on Forbes.com or
NYTimes.com.

The last factor that search engines look at is the mixture of High
and Low-quality backlinks. What this means is if a site only has
Low-Quality backlinks then chances are that site has been spamming small
blogs and social media site. But if a site has a Mix of High and
Low-Quality backlinks then it tells Google that your site is linked to
being trustworthy sites and shared allot by its users and thus it must
have super great content.

By Kyle Piira

I'm a computer science student at the University of Massachusetts and the founder of the Hoxly Corporation.